Gender Differences in the Recognition of Vocal Emotions

Abstract

The conflicting findings from the few studies conducted with regard to gender differences in the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion have left the exact nature of these differences unclear. Several investigators have argued that a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in vocal emotion recognition can only be achieved by replicating these studies while accounting for influential factors such as stimulus type, gender-balanced samples, number of encoders, decoders, and emotional categories. This study aimed to account for these factors by investigating whether emotion recognition from vocal expressions differs as a function of both listeners' and speakers' gender. A total of N = 290 participants were randomly and equally allocated to two groups. One group listened to words and pseudo-words, while the other group listened to sentences and affect bursts. Participants were asked to categorize the stimuli with respect to the expressed emotions in a fixed-choice response format. Overall, females were more accurate than males when decoding vocal emotions, however, when testing for specific emotions these differences were small in magnitude. Speakers' gender had a significant impact on how listeners' judged emotions from the voice. The group listening to words and pseudo-words had higher identification rates for emotions spoken by male than by female actors, whereas in the group listening to sentences and affect bursts the identification rates were higher when emotions were uttered by female than male actors. The mixed pattern for emotion-specific effects, however, indicates that, in the vocal channel, the reliability of emotion judgments is not systematically influenced by speakers' gender and the related stereotypes of emotional expressivity. Together, these results extend previous findings by showing effects of listeners' and speakers' gender on the recognition of vocal emotions. They stress the importance of distinguishing these factors to explain recognition ability in the processing of emotional prosody.

Emotion recognition and confidence ratings predicted by vocal stimulus type and prosodic parameters

“…An all-encompassing term for such vocal qualities of speech is prosody (i.e., tone of voice). Research has shown that prosody may support the correct interpretations of utterances independently of linguistic comprehension (Paulmann, 2016;Thompson and Balkwill, 2009;Kitayama and Ishii, 2002), with studies reporting recognition rates for emotions to be significantly higher than chance (Cowen et al, 2019a(Cowen et al, , 2019bLausen and Schacht, 2018;Cordaro et al, 2016;Paulmann and Uskul, 2014;Juergens et al, 2013;Scherer et al, 2001). In addition, metacognition, the ability to actively monitor and reflect upon one's own performance, has been argued to impact judgements of accuracy in emotion recognition tasks (Begue et al, 2019;Kelly and Metcalfe, 2011;Dunlosky and Metcalfe, 2009).…”

Female Speakers Benefit More Than Male Speakers From Prosodic Charisma Training—A Before-After Analysis of 12-Weeks and 4-h Courses

“…Moreover, neither system has been analyzed so far as to whether men or women benefit differently from using it. There is growing evidence that women are more sensitive to emotional and interactional prosodic elements than men, and that they also use these elements to a greater extent in speech production (Daly and Warren, 2001;Haan, 2002;Lausen and Schacht, 2018). So, if Pascal is able to shift a speaker's prosodic parameters in a more charismatic direction, it is possible that women benefit more from Pascal training than men, meaning that Pascal training would be a suitable means to reduce or close the "gender gap" in entrepreneurship.…”

Peer Review #1 of "Do human screams permit individual recognition? (v0.2)"

“…Although this effect was marginal in the full dataset, it emerged clearly in the subset of data taken from Same Vocalizer and Different Vocalizer trials, i.e., when the ceiling effect of Duration Modified trials was removed. We had predicted that gender effects might account for variation in this task because they also explain some variation in recognizing emotion from vocalizations (Belin, Fillion-Bilodeau, & Gosselin, 2008;Lausen & Schacht, 2018). If anything, however, evidence suggests PeerJ reviewing PDF | (2018:11:32566:2:0:NEW 1 May 2019)…”

“…Manuscript to be reviewed that females are better than males at expressing emotion through nonlinguistic vocalizations such as affect bursts (Lausen & Schacht, 2018), so it seems unlikely that the advantage conferred by male vocalizers here is related to enhanced emotional expression.…”